Companies are embracing the cloud en masse, but are still spending too much money on unnecessary capacity. This is the finding of a recent survey by HashiCorp in partnership with Forrester.
The HashiCorp 2023 State of Cloud Strategy Survey shows that many companies still spend too much on unused cloud resources. Some 94% of respondents say they have costs for this capacity that they could have best avoided.
According to HashiCorp, little has changed compared to 2022. Even back then, almost the same percentage of respondents reported paying more for capacity than they actually needed.
Causes of paying too much
For half of the respondents, the main causes of unnecessary cloud costs are the overprovisioning of cloud resources. Having cloud resources in neutral mode or less utilized is also a major cause of unnecessary costs.
Other causes include a lack of appropriate staff, a lack of an end date to temporary cloud-based resources and additional costs based on the geographic location of end users.
Best practices help
To combat redundant cloud expenditure, the researchers recommend adopting best practices in the cloud arena. These include increased automation and the use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to combat overcapacity.
Best practices also help implement well-defined resource utilization processes and improve scalability. Furthermore, a move to a multi-cloud architecture would work for many companies.
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